Lymphoma in ‘India’ at the Dawn of Targeted Therapies

Excerpt

Thomas Hodgkin, in 1832, as the ‘Inspector of the Dead and Curator of the Museum’ at the medical school of Guys hospital published a paper on “On Some Morbid Appearances of the Absorbant Glands and the Spleen”, what later on Samuel Wilks in the true spirit of peer recognition named as ‘Hodgkin’s disease’ in 1865 [1]. Hodgkin tried cascarilla, soda and iodine to treat his initial 07 patients with obvious lack of success and who went on to become the subjects of autopsy. The long journey in the management of lymphomas to the current day success story has been phenomenal. We are beginning to look at a chemotherapy and radiotherapy free treatment protocol as the cobweb of signal transduction pathways becomes clearer and we are able to unravel the ways to use the targeted therapies in various combinations to achieve the goal of ‘cure’. …